


Hebron

by Lyndsaybones



Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-03 23:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10261130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyndsaybones/pseuds/Lyndsaybones
Summary: For 2momsmakearight's revisit challenge.An arm hanging limply. Legs butterflied open. A hand loosely gripping a bed rail. Her face turned to the darkest part of the room, away from him. And blood, so much that he thinks that there can be no way she has survived. He moves in slowly and presses a tentative finger against the cool skin under her jaw. He’s kissed her there, he thinks. Her pulse kisses him back, slow and steady. He drops to his knees and wraps himself around her with a choked sob.The taught roundness of her belly is now pillowy and slack. He already knows. He knew the second he walked in.The baby is gone.





	

It’s obvious that a lot of cars have cleared out and very recently. There are tire tracks crisscrossing all over the dusty ground. The ramshackle buildings look like ghosts, grey and gaunt. They’re the only witnesses to what’s happened here.

What’s happened?

He staggers a moment when his mind projects the worst case scenario. He races toward the only building with a light burning with a singular purpose driving him.

“Scullaaaaay!” he hollers as he runs.

There’s no answer except the sound of his own footfalls and frenzied breathing. When he clears the doorway, the scene that assaults him makes his stomach lurch.

Blood, in very large amounts, has a distinct smell. It’s one that he’s actually always associated with Scully, oddly enough. Maybe because of all the time he spent over her shoulder in various morgues or surveying garish crime scenes together. Either way, this moment will do nothing to dispel the connection.

Monica Reyes is dead. Her head has been not so neatly relocated on the opposite side of the room. He winces and turns a quick circle and stops cold on a flash of red across the room.

An arm hanging limply. Legs butterflied open. A hand loosely gripping a bed rail. Her face turned to the darkest part of the room, away from him. And blood, so much that he thinks that there can be no way she has survived. He moves in slowly and presses a tentative finger against the cool skin under her jaw. He’s kissed her there, he thinks. Her pulse kisses him back, slow and steady. He drops to his knees and wraps himself around her with a choked sob.

The taught roundness of her belly is now pillowy and slack. He already knows. He knew the second he walked in.

The baby is gone.  
______

They’ve got her in the postpartum wing of the hospital, which he finds ridiculously cruel. She has yet to wake. For that, he is actually thankful. It means he doesn’t have to tell her about Monica or the baby yet. Skinner sat with him while he spoke to local police. When they asked if it was a boy or a girl they should be searching for, he has no idea. He isn’t one hundred percent certain she knows either. His gut twists with hot pain at the notion that she may never know.

Her room is dark and quiet. A kind-faced nurse mercifully did them the favor of removing the bassinet. He can hear occasional chatter in the hall exalting little Hailey’s button nose or how much Tristan looks like his daddy.

She jolts and gasps, eyes wide and wild. He is quick to reach for her.

“They took him,” she howls. “They took him, theytookhimtheytookhimtheytookhimtheytookhim…”

The words become wailing, choking, sobbing.

Him.

A boy.

Their son.  
______

When their son is one week gone, he brings her home. Maggie swept through the apartment and locked everything in the baby’s room ahead of their arrival.  
She’s hardly spoken since that first outpouring of grief and has made no effort to talk about what happened.

The media has caught wind and run with the twisted, tragic tale. The blue TV screens flash pictures of poor dead Monica and poor living Dana. The search is on for a full term infant boy and Billy Miles, who is the only tangible connection. There are news trucks in front of her building when they arrive, so he circles the block and sneaks her in through the back door.

The lightest of touches steers her one way or another. She moves like Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, floating in a haze of painkillers and psych meds as he shepherds her to her bedroom, a hand rooted to the small of her back.

He pulls off her shoes and tucks her into bed. He draws the curtains, makes for the door, ready to slip away. He has no idea what to do for her, or for himself. He’s not sure how to grieve something he didn’t even know he wanted until he’s lost it. He’s scared to face her, ashamed of himself.

“Stay with me,” she whispers, her voice gauzy and thick.

He toes out of his tennis shoes and peels out of his jacket before crawling in behind her. He wraps around her like he did that last night in Oregon.

“He looks just like you,” she murmurs.   
_______

Home for day and she’s done little more than sleep. Not that he expects anything more. He’s had to remind her of the need for self care, handing her pills, urging her to drink, begging her to eat. Maggie shuttles her to and from the restroom every few hours to change out her pad and rinse her stitches.

Maggie, saint that she is, has gone to get groceries and left her daughter in his care for the moment. He is cleaning rotten food out of the fridge to make room for the provisions when he hears her.

“Mulder,” her muffled voice calls.

He finds her sitting on the edge of the bed, struggling to get out of her shirt.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Go get an ace bandage out of the bathroom, please,” she says softly.

“Scully what’re you-”

“My milk came in. I need you to help me bind my breasts to dry it up,” she says without looking up.

He looks down and realizes that the front of her shirt is soaked through in twin oblong spots. He kneels in front of her and takes over working the buttons.

“I can go get the pump,” he offers.

Her eyes find his in the dim light.

“He’s not coming back,” she says flatly.

He hates the idea of her giving up, but this isn’t the time to try and inspire faith. He does as she asks and tracks down an ace bandage. He helps her out of her shirt and sodden bra and begins wrapping the bandage over her swollen breasts.

“Tighter,” she whimpers between gritted teeth.  
_______

When their son is 10 days gone, she is back in the hospital. This time, it is for dehydration and a nasty case of mastitis. He’d woken that morning to find her giving off heat like a radiator and shivering hard enough to vibrate the bed.

They’ve got her on powerful antibiotics and a saline IV. But she still trembles with fever.

Dr. Speake whispers softly, “If she doesn’t respond to the antibiotics, I’m concerned she’ll become septic.”

His eyebrows climb to his hairline. “You’re saying she could die from this?”

“I’m saying she’s very sick and that next few hours are critical.”

How many times has he lived this very moment, sitting sentry at her hospital bed, promising that he’ll never again take her for granted?  
She is murmuring in an undertow of drugs and infection.

“Promise,” she sighs.

“Promise what?” he asks, holding her hand and stroking her hair.

“Don’t stop,” she says, like a breath.

“Scully?”

“William.”

She says nothing more, no matter how much he implores her. But he knows something now that he didn’t know before.

His son’s name.  
________

When their son is 3 months gone, they are walking hand in hand around her neighborhood. They try to get out early before the heat and humidity become oppressive. She tires quickly but works to walk a little further every day.

She has been slow to heal. Six days in a medically induced coma and nearly a month in the hospital, he’s happy just to have her alive. He doesn’t need her to be fast.  
She’s slight and willowy these days, apt to flutter away in a stiff wind. She’s even thinner than she was standing by her own grave as cancer dug the hole.

“I want to get out of here,” she says softly.

“Yeah? We could stand to get out of town for a few days,” he says.

“No, I mean I want leave DC. I don’t want to come back.”

“Where do you want to go?”

He’s not sure why he even asked. He’d set up a house in Death Valley if she asked. The “where” isn’t important, his only concern is her.

She looks off in the middle distance and smiles a little.

“Somewhere quiet,” she says.  
_______

When their son is one year gone, she is sitting under a tree in their backyard reading while he works on replacing boards on the front porch.

The house is unremarkable at best. The real estate listings described it as “cozy” and “full of potential.” During their exhaustive house hunt, they’d learned that those words actually meant “tiny” and “falling apart.”

Nonetheless, she’d been delighted from the moment they’d gotten out of the car and he knew he’d better learn some things about fixing houses. Thus far, they’ve gutted the bathroom, replaced half of the siding, repainted every room and she’s got big plans for the kitchen.

He worried, initially, that this was not the healthiest coping mechanism for her. But she seems to be thriving. The months spent here have put color in her cheeks and weight back on her skeletal frame.

When he asked what they ought to do with the room at the end of the hall, her answer made his knees buckle.

“We should save that one for William.”

“Scully,” he says warningly.

“I know we may never see him again,” she says, looking past the empty room. “But if we did, someday, I want him to know that there was always a place here for him.”  
______

When their son is three years gone, he is sitting on the edge of their bed, bobbing his knee furiously. He is coiled like a spring as the tension fires against his nerves. She’s been in there forever.

She’s been so sick the last few weeks that there are only two plausible explanations: Either she’s pregnant or she’s dying. One is far more likely than the other, which is why he can’t seem to get himself under any semblance of control.

She exits the master bathroom with a tight lipped smile and her eyes dancing like they are lit by candles. He feels like some celestial being just dumped a bucket of ice water on him.

“Really?” he asks.

She nods and flashes him a thousand watt grin. His extremities have gone joyously numb, which is probably why he stumbles as he rises.

An ecstatic laugh roils out of him as he scoops her up into a bear hug.

“Oh my god, this is amazing,” he sighs. He sets her down gently, wiping tears that he hadn’t realized were there as he drops to his knees and begins kissing the cushy flesh below her belly button.

She strokes his hair and laughs with him. They hadn’t even been trying, hadn’t fathomed that it could happen.

Gabriel is born during an ice storm, one which made getting out of the driveway, let alone to the hospital, a difficult task. The bare trees along the road look like they are gilded in silver. Branches litter the asphalt and he starts mentally churning through contingency plans. None of them are an option. She’s delivering at the hospital, not their house, not the back of the car, the hospital. He’s going to do this for her.

Her water breaks as they drive and her labor goes from manageable to terrifying. He’s never seen her like this, so overwhelmed with pain that she cannot breathe. It seems like things are moving so quickly, it’s been only 3 hours since she asked him to start timing contractions.He doesn’t know if it was like this before. She’s never said much about her labor with William, except that she never even touched, let alone held their baby.

“Hurry,” she tells him between contractions.

They make it, just barely. The doctor on call cannot reach them quickly enough and a nurse is the one to deliver a mere ten minutes after they arrive.

The baby lets out a squalling cry upon his arrival and she cradles him against her chest with trembling hands. The combination of relief and anguish overwhelm her and she weeps.   
_______

When their son is ten years gone, Gabriel is meant to start kindergarten soon. Meant to.

“I think we should homeschool,” she says earnestly.

“And by ‘we’ you mean me, right?” he says as he picks up a handful of markers from the table.

“Well, you are the one home,” she says.

“What about Gabe? He’s so excited about starting school this year,” he tells her.

“I know,” she says dejectedly as she drops into a chair. “He’s just so little, if something happened-”

“Nothing is going to happen,” he says, gritting his molars together.

They’ve had some version of this talk more times than he can remember. That’s not true, he remembers every time. First, she refused to have anyone but her mother watch him as a baby for fear he would be spirited away. After that, she got anxious about letting Mulder leave the house with him. Then, she didn’t want to take any trips out of town in case one of “them” spotted him. No safe harbor but their home. She even shies from taking him to the park or the grocery store.

“Dana, I need you to listen to me on this. We have to let him go to school,” he says firmly.

“Dana,” she echoes. “I guess you mean business.”

She is anything but conciliatory, in fact the set of her jaw is a classic Scully non-verbal for “let’s fight.”

“Yes,” he says sharply. “I mean business. He is going to school. End of discussion.”

The fuse is lit and she rises to her feet like the chair has burned her.

“I am his mother and I don’t think he’s ready,” she seethes.

“It’s you that’s not ready,” he shoots back. “And I’m not going to subject him to isolation because of your anxiety.”

Something breaks, he realizes this too late. Her face crumbles and the tears come.

“I couldn’t stop them,” she whispers.

He crosses the distance to her and pulls her into his arms.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he tells her as he smoothes her hair down.

“Mommy?” a small voice calls.

He has hair like cinnamon and wide blue eyes. Maggie swears he is the spitting image of Charles at that age. Scully quickly pulls herself together and turns to him.

“Gabe, it’s late. You need to be in bed,” she tells him as she stoops to pick him up.

He buries his head against her shoulder.

“Do I get to go to school?” he asks dreamily.

“Yeah, baby. You get to go to school.”

She throws Mulder a quick glance and takes Gabe back to his room.  
_______

When their son is 15 years gone, everyone around them is becoming ill. Everyone except Scully.

Gabe is curled up on the couch, burning with fever. Mulder tries to comfort him, but he’s not in much better shape.

Scully is at the hospital, trying to help, trying to save as many as she can. She checks in with Mulder frequently and on her last call, tells him she is coming home, that she may have found a cure.

When Mulder hears knocking, he thinks she must’ve left without her key. He shambles to the door, his head swimming and throbbing.

But it’s not Scully. It’s a boy. A young man with his eyes.

“I’m here to help,” he says.

Mulder blinks, trying to reconcile what he is seeing. This has got to be a feverish hallucination.

“How did you find us?”

He is broad-shouldered and lanky, with shaggy dark hair and hazel eyes.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says as he shoulders in the door. “I’ve got something you need.”

He is already making a bee-line for the couch with Mulder trailing closely.

“Slow down,” he says firmly. “What’re you doing?”

The boy ignores him and crouches in front of Gabe. He presses his palm against his forehead. Gabe’s bloodshot eyes slide open and his right eyebrow lifts.

“Gabe? I’m Will. You’re gonna be okay,” he says. He pulls a syringe from his pocket and jams it into Gabe’s shoulder with no preamble. The image is so eerily familiar. He and Scully lived this very moment a lifetime ago.

The front door swings open with a thwack and Scully comes in a flurry. She halts as though she’s hit an invisible wall.She looks at Mulder and back at the boy kneeling on her floor.

“My God,” she whispers. “He looks just like you.”

Not an hallucination. Not a dream. Their son. It’s the last thought Mulder can piece together before he crumples to the floor.  
_______

When their son is 3 days home, Mulder wakes up to Scully stroking his hair. He can’t help but grin. She looks like on of those devotional candles looking down on him with her beatific smile and titian halo.

“Where is he?” he asks.

“Downstairs with Gabe,” she says.

“It’s really him?”

She smiles broadly.

“It’s him.”

“Where’s he been? Who had him?”

Her mouth tightens into a line and a little tear forms.

“He says it doesn’t matter, that he’s dead.”

“Who?” he asks as he tries to sit up. His head swims and he lays back down. She hushes him and resumes stroking his hair.

“He won’t say, but all of his clothes smelled like smoke.”

“Jesus.”

The notion that their son has been in that man’s clutches this whole time constricts his heart. It makes him nervous. He dares not imagine what that craven bastard considered good parenting, what his tutelage would produce. Scully seems to sense his fear.

“He’s so smart and so brave and…” her voice starts to waver. “And his heart is so, so good. He’s just like you.”

Relief, sweet and purifying washes over him. What once was lost has now been found. Their son is home.


End file.
